Greek Olympic Games Head Into Crisis

Wednesday, March 17, 2004
(3:48 PM ET)
By Brian Williams

Reuters Writer

The delay in work on the main stadium until July 20 has major knock-on effects for security and the staging of opening and closing ceremonies which take weeks of rehearsal. It also means a June athletics test event at the stadium will take place while work is still in progress. "It (Olympic stadium) will be finished, along with the overlays, by July 20," Dimitris Kalitzatzis, managing director of constructor Aktor, told reporters.

A worker adjusts plants in front of the Olympic hockey stadium within the Helliniko Complex, where the Athens 2004 field hockey competition will be hosted, October 20, 2003. Only 150 days before the Olympics open, Greece's new conservative prime minister Costas Karamanlis needs to engineer a quick change of pace if he is to deliver venues and transport links that have long been mired in delays. Fewer than half the 39 venues for the August Games have been finished and the new administration is only now discovering the true scale of problems long played down by their predecessors.

Image Credit: Yiorgos Karahalis -- Reuters

ATHENS -- Reuters
Greek Olympic preparations were in crisis Wednesday after revelations the main stadium would not be ready until less than a month before the Games start and disintegration of political party unity supporting the event.

With a storm also gathering about calling in NATO forces to protect the Games from possible attacks, celebration of the modern homecoming of the Olympics in August after more than a century was increasingly pushed into the background.

The trigger for the crisis -- a week before the lighting of the Olympic flame at the ancient home of the Olympics in Olympia on March 25 -- was the election of a conservative government 10 days ago which ended a decade of socialist rule and exposed long suspected delays in preparations.

Al Qaeda links to train bombings in Madrid also added strains to International Olympic Committee (IOC) demands for "tough decisions" in the next two weeks to ensure the Games went ahead at standards the world had come to expect.

Greece has budgeted nearly one billion dollars, three times the amount spent on the 2000 Sydney Games, to protect the Athens Olympics but some Greek newspaper questioned whether inviting NATO to help would make it a bigger target.

"This decision upgrades the country's security arrangements against international terrorism but it also turns Greece into an attractive first-rate target for al Qaeda," the Ta Nea newspaper said this week.

* FALLING BEHIND

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Dan